UK police probe Russian dissident billionaire’s death

Boris Berezovsky was once the richest and most powerful of the oligarchs who dominated post-Soviet Russia, and a close ally of
Boris Yeltsin
who helped install
Vladimir Putin
as president. But after a bitter falling out with the Kremlin, he exiled himself to London, where he died in unexplained circumstances on Saturday. He was 67.

Last year he lost what was billed as the largest private lawsuit in history, an epic tug-of-war over $US5.1 billion with another Russian oligarch,
Roman Abramovich
, in which legal and other costs were estimated to be about $US250 million.

Mr Berezovsky’s death was first reported in a post on Facebook by his son-in-law, Egor Schuppe, and confirmed by Alexander Dobrovinsky, a lawyer who had represented him.

Mr Dobrovinsky, who runs a law firm with offices in Moscow and London, wrote in Russian on his own Facebook page: “Just got a call from London. Boris Berezovsky has committed suicide. The man was complex. An act of desperation? Impossible to live poor? A series of blows? I am afraid that no one will know the truth."

A spokesman for Mr Putin said Mr Berezovsky had recently sent a letter asking Mr Putin for forgiveness and permission to return to Russia.He asked Mr Putin for forgiveness for the errors to be able to return home.The spokesman said that he did not know Mr Putin’s reaction.

On Sunday police sealed off Mr Berezovsky’s mansion, about an hour outside London near Ascot racetrack, shut down neighbouring streets and sent in hazardous materials experts adding to speculation about foul play.

In Britain, Mr Berezovsky had adopted much the same style as an oligarch back home in Russia. He was driven in chauffeured cars, sometimes a Maybach sedan, that were typically followed by a Range Rover bearing dark-suited bodyguards.

But recent news reports said he had begun to sell personal assets, including a yacht and a painting by Andy Warhol, Red Lenin, to pay debts related to the lawsuit.

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The lawsuit, in which Mr Berezovsky brought a claim against Mr Abramo­vich in a dispute over the sale of shares in Sibneft, a Russian oil company, and other assets, ended in a spectacular defeat.

The judge in the case called Mr Berezovsky an unimpressive and inherently unreliable witness and at times a dishonest one. By contrast, she said Mr Abramovich had been a truthful, and on the whole reliable, witness.

Mr Berezovsky’s legal troubles worsened in recent weeks with a claim by his former girlfriend, Elena Gorbunova, that he owed her about $US8 million from the sale of a house that they owned in Surrey.

A friend of the tycoon said he had been extremely depressed for at least six months since losing the case. He was a great believer in British justice and he felt it let him down. There were also many things on his mind relating to his continued battles with the Kremlin.

Mr Berezovsky was a Soviet mathematician who, after the fall of communism, went into business and figured out how to skim profits off what was then Russia’s largest state-owned carmaker. Along with spectacular wealth, he accumulated enormous political influence, becoming a close ally of Mr Yeltsin.

With Mr Yeltsin’s political career fading, Mr Berezovsky helped engineer the rise of Mr Putin, an obscure former KGB agent and one-time aide to the mayor of St Petersburg, who became president in 2000 and in May returned to the presidency for a third term.

After his election, Mr Putin began a campaign of tax claims against a group of rich and powerful Russians, including Mr Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an oil tycoon, who remains jailed in Russia.

Mr Berezovsky fled to London, where he eventually won political asylum and at one point raised tensions by calling for a coup against Mr Putin.

David Hoffman, the author of The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia, said Mr Berezovsky stood out for seeking not only wealth but also political clout.

He was among that wave of oligarchs who realised that great fortunes were to be made in the massive sell-off of assets in the new Russia. While many of his peers also saw the opportunity, Mr Berezovsky was more focused than most on the role that politics would play. He realised the need to co-opt those in power in order to make deals. He did it from the early days with cars and later with oil.

Mr Berezovsky had an outsize, if hardly always benevolent, role in post-Soviet Russia.

George Soros, a financier and a critic of the Russian oligarchs, had likened them to 19th-century American robber barons. But if that was an apt metaphor, the power and influence of these new tycoons was amplified by the legal and political vacuum left by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

MrBerezovsky amassed his fortune at first in automobiles, including a business he formed in 1993 with Alexander Voloshin, who would later become Yeltsins chief of staff. But like other oligarchs, Mr Berezovsky’s interests spread across many sectors of the post-Soviet Russian economy, to oil; media; and Aeroflot, the Russian airline.

He survived an assassination attempt in 1994, a car bombing in which his driver was killed.

The assassination attempt connected him to a KGB officer, Alexander Litvinenko, who was poisoned by the radioactive isotope polonium 210 in London in November 2006.

Litvinenko, then working for the FSB, the domestic successor to the KGB, was assigned to investigate the blast, and Mr Berezovsky became his mentor and later his employer.

He helped Litvinenko flee Russia in 2000 before he, too, left the country to seek asylum in London.

On the day he was poisoned, Nov. 1, 2006, Litvinenko went from a meeting with several Russians at a four-star hotel in central London to Mr Berezovsky’s nearby office. There he met with a Chechen exile, Akhmed Zakayev, another Berezovsky protege, and the two drove together to adjacent homes financed by Mr Berezovsky, in North London.

After Litvinenkos death, and with his wealth dwindling during his time in London, Mr Berezovsky slowly withdrew his financial support for Litvinenkos widow as she pressed for an inquest into the death, now scheduled to begin in May.

Boris Abramovich Berezovsky was born in Moscow on Jan. 23, 1946, to Abram Berezovsky, a civil engineer who worked in construction, and Anna Gelman, at a time when the Soviet Union was recovering from World War II.

He studied forestry and mathematics and graduated from the Moscow Forestry Engineering Institute. He worked as an engineer and researcher until the late 1980s.

In the mid-1990s, he served on Russia’s security council, only to be dismissed from that post by Yeltsin in 1997. Six months later, Mr Berezovsky failed in a bid to prevent Mr Yeltsin from naming Sergei Kiriyenko as prime minister. Shortly afterward though, Mr Yeltsin appointed Mr Berezovsky as chief executive of the Commonwealth of Independent States. It was the sort of surprise move that Mr Yeltsin relished but part of a pattern that even his supporters later came to view as erratic.

Mr Berezovsky and Mr Putin had been close, and Mr Berezovsky aided Mr Putin’s rise to the presidency. But signs came quickly that Berezovsky had fallen out of favor. In October 2000, just 10 months after Mr Yeltsin’s resignation, Mr Berezovsky was ordered to vacate a spacious government country house and to return the government plates on his limousine. He left Russia for Britain in 2000.

In March 2003, the British authorities arrested Mr Berezovsky and said they were beginning a process that could lead to his extradition. But he was granted political asylum later that year apparently after the British determined that Russia sought him solely on political grounds.

In 2007, he was convicted of fraud charges by a Russian court in absentia and sentenced to six years in prison, and had potentially faced prosecution in at least 10 other cases.